Yes but my wife frowns upon it.
I'd prefer YC's comments not go the way of Digg or Reddit.
Note that 3 of your last 5 comments are you being the HN police. Maybe consider relaxing and enjoying life a little more, rather than attempting to impose your vision of what the site should be upon everyone else.
And you're right, I don't come here for humor or jokes or any other bullshit. I come here because the name is "hacker news" and thus far, it has done a pretty good job of living up to both words in that name. The reason I come here is 80% for the comments, 20% for the actual links. I learn more from the comments than I do from most of the articles and I'd like to keep it that way. I go elsewhere for humor, and I don't want to spend my time sorting the two out here. Is that asking for too much?
I see now in the guidelines that my original comment is frowned upon. I only have a 56 karma currently so I apparently don't meet the threshold for downvoting/flagging (I'm more of a gatherer/reader than a karmawhore) so this is all I've got available as a tool to shape things. So, I retract my request and I'll go back to lurking and if/when the signal:noise ratio goes to shit I'll go looking for something else (tho, HN does seem to be the last resort for good S:N so my hopes aren't too high).
I did not mean to imply that you should never comment, just that you should lighten up a bit and let the voting system and PG's guiding hand take its course. I'd say overall it's doing a pretty great job. I didn't realize just how great until I spent a half hour on Reddit.
FWIW, this was my second highest comment and second most replied-to comment since I joined. In both dimensions this comment lost to my first comment which 1) was a reply to PG, 2) invoked the "hi i just registered here" sympathy upmod and 3) invoked "boo reddit/digg" sentiment in this parenthetical comment:
(I'm a recent reddit lurker, and as reddit continues to become digg my clicks seem to be heading elsewhere)
So, I agree with you fundamentally, but it looks like that's not how things are going to play out, if my first lets-be-a-jackass comment scored so well.
Perhaps there's some middle ground?
Everyone has their limit, but I'm not offended by a little risque humour (obviously), and it doesn't seem inappropriate for the site so long as it's not explicit or vulgar. My primary beef with reddit is that as an "all things to all people" site the front page is filled O LOOK A LOL CAT ITS A CAT WITH FUNNY WORDS [pic], and the comment threads are filled with semi-predictable reply chain puns.
I'd love to read consensus (esp PG comments) for style guidelines for this site. I'm a geek and a trendy comp-sci field dabbler, but I'm not building a startup, despite my desire to be an entrepreneur, and I'm definitely not in Y Combinator, so I have a pretty good idea where my opinion lays in the grand scheme of things here.
All articles being about tech/hacker interest seems 100%+ sensible. If the style guidelines are "No empty humor comments, period. Startups are Serious Business." Then perhaps I haven't found the right community fit for myself (hey look a startup idea!).
There's nothing wrong with mixing in a little humor. It's been awhile since I read PG's guidelines, but I don't remember a ban on it. I don't think your joke broke the bounds of civility. It's a little blue for sure, but not NSFW.
A joke here and there (even an off-color one) is FAR from turning this site into Reddit or Digg. I started surfing those for the first time a week or two ago just to see why everyone here complains about them, and wow is this site worlds apart (in a good way). I was actually shocked at how Reddit links are often so editorialized that I can't even guess what will be there when I click through.
BTW: I recently wanted to make an inane joke on a HN article, so I found the article on reddit using the below (I have it as a bookmark):
javascript:location.href='http://reddit.com/submit?url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+'&title='+encodeURIComponent(document.title)